


scintillate

by setokaibas



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Gen, atem and yuugi mentioned briefly, be warned there are gozaburo mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-23 05:57:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9643517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/setokaibas/pseuds/setokaibas
Summary: aka: seto kaiba learns something new, perhaps even frightening, about his brother.post-series, pre-dsod. kaiba-centric. hints of prideshipping and rivalshipping if you squint hard and hold your breath.





	1. overwork

**Author's Note:**

> acknowledgement to @aigamidiiva on tumblr for tolerating my many seto rants.  
> this is my first ygo fanfiction, and will be a two-chapter work totaling about 1500 words. constructive and concrete criticism only, please. reviews and kudos very much appreciated; thank you for reading, and i hope your day is blessed.
> 
> NOTE: this first chapter is mostly about kaiba. more plot will happen in the next portion.

The lights of KaibaCorp scattered across the glass desk that the hands of Seto Kaiba truly called home. It was a home won with years of pain, but one which he had formed into his own image. A boyish smile, flitting, barely impressed itself upon his face before it was swallowed up by the chill of Gozaburo.

Seto felt the dull sting of harsh words lance themselves into his back. Instinctively– although not without taking another deep breath and moving the analyzer into its proper position– he moved back, away from the phantom memory of the beating that only words could bring. The boy which cowered bravely beneath those verbal blows was the Seto of the past, but the Seto of the future– he was greater than the bottom-feeding scum that stole his childhood. Yet the simple fantasy of something greater had never been enough to scour his mind of it all.

Perhaps he could not bury the boy that beat Gozaburo Kaiba in a game of chess, but he had never been known to be one who gave up on his plans. The old man had tried to spin the adoption off as a game of kindness to the sniveling sycophants he called investors, and he supposed they never knew better. Gozaburo was good enough to deceive them, but he was never intelligent enough to beat Seto at anything, and that is why he was afraid, had always been afraid, and why he had been eliminated as one of the unfit.

Seto scoffed as he regained his steadfast focus on tinkering with the analyzing machine. A code snagged within the advanced operating system Seto had demanded be installed on his personal laptop, and the computer gave a beleaguered wail. A sigh of irritation issued from between his lips, but that was merely something else to be expected in the humdrum malfunction of this reality. His mind frustratingly wandered from the task, so simple for his mind, and it quickly went to the darkness. Kindness was such a ridiculous concept when coming from the lying lips of the bully that was his adoptive father. There was no kindness for him, in the end. No kindness for Mokuba.

At that, Seto’s fist clenched. _Mokuba._

(Perhaps he hauled the dueling disk prototype up onto the analyzer with a bit too much force, but _they_ would never know.)

Mokuba, the brother he had protected all of these years. There was a point where Seto thought it was better not to love, so as not to fall prey to the vices of weak men, but it seemed the cheap friendship speeches Anzu gave had struck the soft part he carefully kept hidden. Mokuba was the reason he worked himself to the bone and to the bleeding. All for him, all to spite the warmongering council and the adoption committee and the newspapers, all to tear down a culture of death that condemned his brother to a life without him. But Seto was not weak. He was not a traitor to his own ideals, and his ideals told him that the mediocre self espoused by the occasionally limp oversight of Yuugi Motou was not to be accepted.

The tools he had bought for the plans before him were expensive– he had seen the ledger with his own eyes– but their chrome promised to bend to his genius as well as his deck did. The computer screen flickered as he logged into the program he had coded himself; the others he had found were all too inferior to stand up to the robust nature of his design. His fingers ached as he worked anew, but mind over matter, mind over matter. He had to beat the pharaoh, to rid himself of the stain of dishonor that was his loss to the transcendent being. The pharaoh had soiled his brother’s eyes with defeat and turned him into the laughingstock of the dueling community. But no more! He, Seto Kaiba, would once again take his rightful place as dueling champion of the world.

With little effort, Kaiba finished tightening the painfully small bolts on the first portion of the duel disk before reaching to the side of his face to flick his personal light on into fluorescent life. The wattage of the bulb made him blink for a moment, and his blue eyes ached with the brightness of it. Another drink of hot tea brewed hours earlier, and he was ready to continue past the sun that lazily shifted down the horizon and neglected its duties in the natural order. All too easily, the mathematics solved itself in some recess of his brain. The stubborn creep of exhaustion pressed incessantly into his focus, but out of sheer will more pieces made their way into the intricate hexagonal framework as the minutes ticked by. Small victories, like the whir of the cooling fan or the flawlessness of the holographic card projection which so eerily matched the magnificence of his blue-eyes, drove the adrenaline high on and on. It raged through his veins like the alcohol Gozaburo sampled occasionally until finally his hands screamed from their overuse. His right wrist flamed with pain, and Seto paused almost disinterestedly to rub it into submission. There was no time for delay, not even from the impending exhaustion of his fleshly shell.

A clearing of a young throat behind him shakes him slightly from his work, then another, closer, piques his attention. Kaiba turns around, his erect posture drooping ever-so-slightly before he raises himself to a presentable height. He knows exactly who it is that has come to search for him in his study. Even to himself, he cannot admit the slight pinch of guilt that inflames his will.

“Why aren’t you still asleep, Mokuba?”


	2. realization

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kaiba and mokuba come to a conclusion about themselves. last chapter of scintillate.  
> kudos to @card-gays, @jujuoh, and @aigamidiiva on tumblr for listening to me scream about ygo for 12 years straight.   
> kaiba-centric; includes brotherly love, fluff, and mokuba standing up for himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading this far and contributing to my love of the kaiba brothers.   
> please leave comments; constructive criticism only, if you wouldn't mind. if you have any requests, let me know in the comments. please, if you wouldn't mind, say if you would like to see a series of kaiba brothers moments from me. have a blessed day.

“Why aren’t you still asleep, Mokuba?”

He flicks his eyes to the face of his younger brother, the one he had worked so hard to protect, to educate. The large eyes stared back at him in a semblance of awareness, their irises gleaming with exhaustion. "I... came to look for you, big bro." Mokuba's voice, strong yet still slightly wavering carried across the air to Kaiba's ears. His head throbbed with exhaustion, one of his rare migraines beginning to make that signature halo around his vision (note to himself: choose water for the next few days). But there was no time for pain, not if he was going to prove himself right once and for all. Seto knew he had to make Mokuba sleep again before he could resume his work. Otherwise, the younger would never stop pulling at his will unless he finally acquiesced. It was a trait of Mokuba's that Kaiba often found useful in dealing with unsavory elements, and one that at the moment he could find (rather frustratingly) nothing other than tempting to succumb to. 

"I appreciate your concern, but now is not the time. Go back to bed and rest."

"No way, Seto. We're going back to sleep."

Kaiba rested his head on his hands, lacing his fingers together and pushing the resulting ball into his skull in the hope of abating the throbbing behind his eyes. 

"Mokuba, I know you rifled through my desk and saw these plans. They are due tomorrow."

At that moment, Mokuba gave a small snort that resembled indignation. 

"Today. It's 5:00 am. They are due today, and they are done."

"Mokuba, absolutely not. The VR system is not completely--"

"Just stop already, Seto." 

The voice came out chilly, dominant, like his. Out of what was perhaps morbid curiosity, Seto looked at Mokuba from between his fingers for a few long seconds. What he realized was sunlight cast a glow over Mokuba's face. The swollen reddishness of Mokuba's arteries stood out against the pale white of his sclera, and his eyes were ringed with a slight bag that betrayed the same long hours Seto kept. The younger boy's figure-- when had he gotten so much taller, Kaiba wondered--hunched over despite conscious efforts to stand tall. A faint twist of guilt wrenched his stomach, and Kaiba's eyes opened in unaccustomed shock.

Mokuba was ending up like him. No. No.

No, the thrill of fear said. It wasn't supposed to be this way. After all you did to protect him...

Kaiba forced his legs, which let out an almost indistinguishable pop at the knee, to stand up. The muscles ached with stiffness from their stationary rest, and Seto stretched them for a few paces as he rose up to his full height. In the back of his mind, he knew Mokuba was correct. His more disadvantageous tendencies had been getting to him ever since the apparent disappearance of his greatest rival. He supposed it was time that he did get some sleep. 

A small nudge against his side as he walked around his desk led Kaiba to look down. Mokuba had grasped onto his hand softly, his hand still smaller than Seto's despite all the time that elapsed since they had last walked like this. The silence between them, for strange seconds upon seconds, was unpleasantly deafening. Mokuba stepped ahead of Seto to open the door once they had shuffled tiredly to the end of the office space, but never let go of his hand. The resulting pivot led to Kaiba being tugged along through the door and onward, downward to the room they kept for sleeping when it was too late to call the chauffeur at the mansion.

His fingers locked in Mokuba's, Seto looked down at their intertwined hands between steps on the stairwell. Mokuba's head bobbed ahead of him, steady but slightly drooping with exhaustion. Yet he led on, and a sense of dawning irony crowned Kaiba's reason for the only time in his young life that he could remember with any sort of half-satisfaction.

If everything was for Mokuba, Mokuba would still learn on his own. 

Seto knew his brother had great intelligence; at 5 he could speak more than intelligibly, and at 7 he had mastered rudimentary algebra. Yet, Mokuba's strengths were not his own; he was more charismatic, friendly. He had even gained the affection of Seto's greatest rival without lifting a finger! For too long, he had relegated Mokuba to a secondary role in his mental organization despite recognizing his worth as being superior to any of Anzu's frippery. What a grave mistake he had almost made, not realizing Mokuba's talent fully in conjunction with his brotherly affection for Seto. It was a mistake that had to be avoided at all costs, and one that he had to correct in his own mind more harshly than ever before. 

Eventually, Mokuba stopped, and Seto crisply avoided bumping into him as he pulled himself out of the whirlwind of thought that he called his closest friend. This time, he reached forward to push the heavy door out of Mokuba's way, and the younger boy pushed past him slightly to take the door and pull Seto through. Yet, this time, Seto would have none of it. He unlaced his fingers from Mokuba's carefully before moving to pull Mokuba up into his arms, hugging him to his side as he did when they were younger. For the first time, Seto knew not how Mokuba would respond. Would he push him away out of the hatred of his father, of Gozaburo's bottles and harsh yell that shook the mansion?

Instead, Mokuba simply stretched in Kaiba's arms, throwing his arms around Kaiba's neck. A face was pressed to Seto's larger cheek, then to his ear:  
"Imagine Joey's face when I told him you actually let some people touch you."

A sonorous chuckle shook against Seto's arm at the older's raised eyebrow before Mokuba's head simply laid limply on Seto's shoulder. With practiced strides, Kaiba walked them over to the full bed stashed in a corner of the safe room, moving a microscope and a textbook out of the way. The Blue-Eyes White Dragon sheets made way for Mokuba's sleeping form under Seto's direction, and eventually the older's body also followed suit once it shed its heavy coat and designer clothing. Pulling Mokuba against him, something inside Kaiba softened to feel his body relaxing. A muscle unsnarled reluctantly as he pulled Mokuba to his side, but its stretch was stopped by a small arm suddenly pressing its hand against his chest. 

"Seto?" The sentence was sleepy, endearing. 

Kaiba opened one eye, the crystal blue glinting in the dim light.

"Yes, Mokuba?"

"I love you, big bro."

Seto looked up at the ceiling and closed his eye before pulling Mokuba closer and planting one small kiss on the crown of his head.

"You too. Go to sleep."  
And sleep they did, after long years of a nightmare.


End file.
